Tuesday, March 14, 2017

The Final Solution: All in the Family

The problem with Trump is that the more mistakes he makes
the more he fits into the role for which he’s loved, by those who love him. He
literally defies gravity to the extent that despite the unfoundedness of his
non-sequiturs—such as the recent accusation that Obama wiretapped Trump
Tower—he only gives his followers more of what they want. He’s like Falstaff.
His foibles only make him more endearing to his constituency. “I could shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” he declaimed
during the campaign. As long as he loses his cool and starts tweeting he’s
going to get applause. The gravitas of his accusations is besides the point.
The more epic the blunder, the more empathic he becomes. Trump’s big hurdle
will come when he starts making sense. At that point he's likely to leave many
of his followers behind. Trump has been compared to many demagogues, but as a
television personality the character he most closely resembles is Carroll
O’Connor’s Archie Bunker from the 70’s sit-com All in the Family—a title that might be well applied to the present
White House. Actually Archie himself resembles Jackie Gleason’s Ralph
Cramden on The Honeymooners. Both
characters pulled at our heartstrings, even as they walked away with their
tails between their legs. The question isn’t when Trump is going to act presidential, rather what's going to happen if he stops behaving like a
buffoon and blowhard? That’s when his ratings will really start to plummet.

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.